


Through Playing

by TheSigyn



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 12:11:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4348349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I hug Drusilla close, ready to let her take me down with her, as she did a hundred years ago. Break all the barriers, shatter all the rules, fill me with evil blood and tear out my broken heart, so I no longer feel the pain. Spike's point of view in the Bronze and his crypt during Crush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through Playing

The Bronze is hot with stage lights and sodden humanity, drunken and high on the band and their haunting music. I’ve no bloody clue who’s playing tonight. I stopped following music since I left New York punk and the CBGB club. The fads all move around too bloody fast. Now all I do is listen and enjoy whatever is playing.

I feel like myself again, for the first time since Dru left. Evil is so easy – I steal some liquor off a passing waitress, and apparently I look too dangerous for her to even protest. I feel good about that. About time they all realized that. They think they’ve tamed me, put me in an electric collar. And I almost believed them. I’m disgusted with myself for playing their game, buying into their scheme. The bad guy playing at being good – what a stupid game that was.

Why haven’t I done this before? Why did it take Drusilla to draw the bloodlust back out of me? I could have made Harmony kill for me, it would have been easy. She was just a dumb blonde. I could have seduced her into it. She wasn’t easily led – her personality too strong to make a good minion – but she was easily seduced. That was what I’d liked in Harm, after all. She could still be seduced, teased. She had more humanity than your usual demon-swamped vamp. She was like me in that regard – just enough humanity left to make that difference, that slight touch of human personality. Shame that personality was charged with gossip and shopping and self-importance, so vapid and banal.

There’s nothing human about Dru. I’ve never been sure there was anything human left even before Angel turned her. I take her by the hip and pull her onto the dance floor, pouring myself into her as I did for over a century. The scent of her, so familiar, so comforting, the feel of her wiry arms as she drapes them around me. I want her to fall into me. I want those distant eyes to gaze into mine. I want to know she’s missed me as much as I missed her. I caress her skin with my open lips, trying to catch her attention, seduce her into me, but she’s drawn elsewhere, actually turning away. I catch her from behind, keep her, playing with her in the music, but she won’t look at me.

Why won’t she look at me?

I follow her gaze. At least she’s looking at something real, tonight. Half the time when she looked at things, I could never bloody see them. Up on the balcony a pair of lovers are drowning in passionate kisses, the rest of the world faded in the heat of their embrace. Dru caresses my cheek, her eyes fixed on what I know to be her favorite meal – happiness. That’s why she always liked hunting children – it was easy to find one who was laughing. Those two are content with each other, if only for the moment. It’s Dru’s raison d'être to destroy that happiness when she finds it.

I hug her close, ready to let her take me down with her, as she did a hundred years ago. Break all the barriers, shatter all the rules, fill me with evil blood and tear out my broken heart, so I no longer feel the pain.

How the bloody hell does Dru know to come whenever I’m heartbroken? Why does she come on the nights when some other bint makes me cry?

Maybe she wants to be the only one to make me do it. That sounds like her. As if my pain can belong to her alone.

She leads me up the stairs, the bloodlust already harsh and demonic in her face. The balcony is pretty much empty save for the heated couple, and Dru never looks at me once as she makes a beeline for them. She stalks up behind them like a black panther, catches hold of the girl, and snaps her neck so fast neither she, nor her lover, have the vaguest clue what just happened. Dru throws the girl at me, and only then does she look at me, her yellow eyes empty with bloodlust.

It’s only a glance, as she’s too hungry for her happiness. She catches hold of the boy – who has just begun to get a clue, the terror on his face clear – and covers his mouth with her hand to muffle his scream as she makes the first bite. She quells him quickly, dragging him down into silence, and he stops struggling. She didn’t kill him at the first grab – that would be such a waste of a beating heart – but she’s hurt him, and he goes limp under her bite. She’s an expert at this. I’ve seen other vamps kill. Dru and I are masters. It takes real skill to keep a victim quiet in public. What a perfect black rose I come from.

I’m holding the girl in my arms – the warm body of the freshly killed girl. She’s plumper than the stick-figure fashion that is popular now, a Victorian softness to her arms, her throat, very seductive in its ageless way. The idea of biting her is almost overwhelming. I haven’t touched a human throat, drunk fresh human blood, in so long. The very thought of it makes me feel about to swoon. My breath comes harder, and I...

I hesitate. Why the sodding hell am I hesitating? I want this. I want this so badly my teeth are aching with it, and my tongue is already twitching, and I want her. Why haven’t I already sunk my teeth in? What am I waiting for?

I look up at Dru, gnawing on her human victim, and she finally looks at me properly. Blood dripping down her jaw, she releases her meal and stares at me. She says nothing, but I can read her demon eyes. Go on. Take her. What are you waiting for?

It’s the same voice echoing in my own head.

Why do I want to tell her no? What the hell is warring inside me? Buffy, Buffy, Buffy wouldn’t approve Bloody hell, Buffy wouldn’t care! She already doesn’t care! It doesn’t matter what you do, she’s always going to think you a killer, know you for the killer you are! Be what you are, and god damn it to hell!

The war aches in my blood – I didn’t expect it to be there. It doesn’t make sense. But it’s there, making me feel like a little boy, playing at being bad, suddenly over his head. I don’t know where this is coming from. But the bloodlust hasn’t been there, not like it was. And while I know I’m bad, Dawn – Dawn thinks I’m funny, and she feels safe around me. And Joyce thinks I’m charming, and she likes Passions. And Buffy... Buffy....

Buffy.

Buffy made me cry.

I want to break the bint’s neck and suck her dry for making me feel like that. The demon rises in me, and I know who won the bloody war.

I take the girl. I fall into the temptation, and try to be only Spike again. If I draw in her dead blood, there might not be enough room for Buffy inside me anymore. The girl’s body is still warm, my hunger’s raging, the death so fresh there is still the occasional residual impulse fluttering her heart, unaware the spinal cord has been completely severed. I bite deep and suck, pulling out every pulse of blood that her dying heart can send me, every drop my mouth can draw. I clench and shake her warm soft form, causing more sweet, precious life to course through her, into me.

I finish before Dru does. Her victim quiescent, but not dead, there is more blood her prey can send her. I pull away from my victim and look down at the empty, bloodless hole in her throat. All her flowing blood has been drawn inside me. Everything I could suck out. I can feel her warmth coursing through my body, feel how alive it makes me, from deep in my core all the way out to my fingertips. Everything is sharper, more clear. I am filled with power. There is nothing I can’t do, no evil that is not mine to cherish, no lust that is not mine to indulge.

So why do I feel sick?

I swallow, the taste of her blood still in my mouth, and let her limp form fall to the floor of the balcony.

There has been no pain, no impulse from the chip to tell me what I have done is wrong. The girl was dead by the time I got my hands on her. There is certainly no remorse, no guilt or shame at the death or the act defilement that was draining her body dry. The taste in my mouth is perfection, charging me like a battery. So what is it that aches so? What is this voice inside me, saying so clearly, “You’re revolting.”

The look on Buffy’s face if she’d been watching me... the thought of it burns in the back of my head, and to my horror, it’s almost as painful as the bloody chip. Because it isn’t terror – I get off on terror. It’s pure disgust.

I stand back, feeling powerful but numb with it, and watch as Dru finishes with her victim. Then, just as she used to, she arranges the bodies around each other as if they were her dolls, having them snuggle, propped against the balcony rail. I used to find this kind of act endearing. Sweet, even. Childlike. Now it seems almost grotesque. Kill if you’re going to kill, but why play with them like that? What does that serve? She kisses each of them on the cheek with her blood stained lips and turns back to me.

She kisses me, still tasting of her kill. I let her, but there is no relish in it. I feel like those victims on the floor, like her doll. The desire I felt for her earlier has been completely swamped in the rush of hot, dead blood. I still feel sick.

Maybe I’ve just had too much. People are cheap, but blood is expensive. I’ve been taking it in glasses, not liters. I’ve been filling up on human food, and polishing off the cravings with the blood I need to keep strong and functioning. The average adult human has about five and a half liters of blood inside them – I probably took at least two or three from that woman. That dead woman. That dead victim, curled in the arms of her murdered lover, with Dru’s bloody kiss on her cheek.

God, I feel ill.

I’m overfull and saturated as she takes me down the stairs, back through the crowded music club. The music is discordant now, and the rhymes seem wrong with the rhythm. Who the hell wrote these lyrics? Even I could do better than that. Or I could have, once. I feel dizzy.

Bloody hell. Dru drags me outside, laughing, dancing in the starlight, one of her little songs, that I could never hear, apparently sounding all around her. Part of me wants to join her, as I used to, blissful, evil, free, dancing to a mad music that never existed. I feel too dizzy. I haven’t had real human blood in over a year, not hot and fresh from the dying flesh. Even the few cold shots of human stuff I’ve managed to buy – or more usually win in a game – came from living donors. There have been no victims. What the hell has she done to me?

Earlier this evening I walked home battling tears. I hadn’t planned on telling Buffy anything at all about how I felt – I just wanted to be close to her. If anything was going to happen between us, it was going to happen naturally, I knew that. I couldn’t push it. But she’d caught on, and I had to take my chance, and I sodding blew it.

Buffy.

You should kill her. Set a trap. Get some help. Figure out a way. Forget that foolishness in your heart, and just bloody take her!

What the hell? Why is this even still a war? I know who won – the taste of the girl’s blood is still on my lips, there is no question about who won. There was never any question. I am a killer. I have always been a killer, from the moment I clawed my way out of the grave. I only hesitated because I mostly got off the blood last year at Giles’ flat, chained in his sodding bathtub, not because I ever wanted to stop killing. I ache for the killing – I still need it, getting my rush from staking my own kind. It helps. I always used to stake my own kind, anyway, to keep myself the biggest bad in the area, keep my killing grounds from being over hunted, bringing in suspicious authorities. But I know who I am. I know what I am. I’m Drusilla’s love, William the Bloody, the slayer of slayers, the big bad. Why do I even have to tell myself to take out Buffy? It should be instinct – no discussion necessary.

But Dru still isn’t really looking at me. She’s never really looked at me.

Bloody hell, what’s happened to me?

Buffy.

The thought of her still lights a fire in my chest. It still makes me ache with longing, and not for her blood. I want her flesh, her eyes, her laugh, her scent... I want her hard fists in my face when she’s pissed, and to dance with her side by side as we slaughter yet another demon. I want the way she looks at me. It’s not fond, but it’s so very real. Buffy can see me. I want to be in her heart, a part of her, so much more than I want her blood as part of me.

I’m more insane than Dru is.

A scent catches me as we approach my crypt. A fresh scent – the slayer. She’s there. It feels as if the world has been sprinkled with cinnamon, a scent spicy, and comforting, and powerful. It heats my blood. Dru catches the scent too, and giggles. She says something to me, something about now being the chance to push her away proper. Yes. Yes it is.

I can all but feel the song of evil playing inside me, vibrating like a cello. Dru opens my weapons chest and bags my cattle prod. It’s her style of weapon – torturous rather than lethal. Dru gets off on the torture lots more than I ever did. I never was one for the pre-show.

Buffy’s down in my lower chamber, I know she’s probably seen my bloody shrine. I’m embarrassed by that thing, but it took the edge off the longing. Stolen photographs, snatched clothing, I even went back to the factory and salvaged Angel’s old sketches. It helped to look at her, think about her. It made it so I didn’t have to sodding go to her all the time – I knew that would get old with her bloody quick.

The war is still raging, but the dark voice sings louder with the voice of the dead girl in my blood. I let it talk, let Dru have her way, until Buffy’s down, unconscious, at our mercy. If Dru had attacked Buffy then, I would have let her. I’d have let the slayer die at my feet, and the war would be won, forever. But Dru offers to play with her first. Play with her. Dru’s idea of fun.

Drusilla is always playing. Her own games, her own songs, eternally selfish, never anything to do with me. Even Harmony, self-centered Harmony, whom I never loved, thought about me, asked what I was thinking, what I really wanted, rather than just assume it was all about her desires. I look down at the fallen slayer. “I’m through playing,” I say.

Dru says something about loving how I get down to business. I know she doesn’t. She barely even looks at me, most of the time. She doesn’t love me. She loves the idea of me. She loves how I loved her. How I took care of her. She loves the doll she tried to make out of me. I used to be content enough inside that little-girl game of hers. Now my eyes are open. I don’t want be a dolly anymore.

I take the cattle prod from her hands and strike Drusilla down with it. I stand, feeling cold despite the hot blood inside me. The blood tells me I can do anything, that there are no consequences. Lying at my feet are two women I’ve loved desperately, light and dark, day and night, slayer and vampire. Why the hell is this still a war? There’s too much blood in me. The eternal song of evil sounds discordant. The war is too painful. I can’t make this choice. I have to have someone make it for me. The decision on Dru’s side is clear – Buffy’s the only question. If I have even a chance of winning her, quenching this burning ache inside me, this thing that’s turning me inside out....

I’ll have to leave it to her. I just hope, by the end of this night, I know once and for all who I am. One game or another has to end.

“I’m bloody well through playing.”


End file.
